Pulitzer Prize winning author Louis Bromfield lived and worked at (and brought fame to) Malabar Farm from 1939 to 1956. But the story of the land that became Malabar began long before Bromfield arrived.

Mornings are my favorite time at Malabar, that time when the farm is quiet and the animals still, that time of soft mists floating over pale green fields of dew dampened timothy grass and red clover, that time when the Eastern sky is streaked with faint ribbons of pink and purple, the sun still only a promise on the horizon. It was on just such a bucolic summer morning that I first gave voice to my impressions of Malabar with the words “these thousand acres.”

By way of a vaguely ethereal process the phrase “these thousand acres” had come to me out of the gray mists and the rolling green hills of Malabar. Thoughts of this book, These Thousand Acres: The Story of the Land That Became Malabar Farm, developed only bit by bit out of my reflections on these three words.